Upcoming Events @ C4E: Info & Registration

  • Tue, Apr 2, 2024

    Matthew Sussman, Literary Criticism and the Ethics of Pluralism

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    Literary Criticism and the Ethics of Pluralism

    What is the relationship between literary appreciation and attitudes toward diversity in modern liberal democracies? This presentation discusses how literary criticism has contributed to the advancement of pluralism by tracing its origins in the aesthetic and moral thought of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It describes how an awareness of aesthetic diversity relativised standards of taste, and discusses the emergence of a form of dispassionate appreciation that called for understanding without subjective liking. Taken together, these developments show how aesthetic criticism predicated itself upon reasoned disagreement, cultivating the attitudes and habits of mind that are characteristic of liberal tolerance.

    ► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

     

    Matthew Sussman
    English
    University of Sydney

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Wed, Apr 3, 2024

    Katie Stockdale, Resentment and Self-Respect

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    Resentment and Self-Respect

    Many philosophers have defended the value of resentment to moral and political life. Resentment is thought to be a valuable expression of self-respect that stands up against moral wrongdoing and injustice. Although I have defended this conception of resentment in my own work, I’ve come to think that the emotion’s value has been overstated. Strong claims about the supposedly ‘close connection’ between resentment and self-respect can feel empowering for those of us whose lives have been marked by injustice. But they can also feel alienating to the moral agent who experiences resentment more as a destructive force in their lives than a motivating force for justice. This talk explores how we might make space for the self-respecting moral agent who does not feel resentful about wrongful acts and injustices done to them. I argue that people can have very good reasons to take a more sympathetic than resentful perspective on why people do what they do, interpreting wrongdoers’ acts to ‘mean’ much more about the wrongdoers’ attitudes toward themselves and the circumstances of their own lives than the moral worth of the people whom their actions affect.

    ► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

     

    Katie Stockdale
    Philosophy
    University of Victoria

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Fri, Apr 5, 2024

    Anton Ford, The Objectification of Agency

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    The Objectification of Agency

    Agents are subjects and objects of thought: subjects, because in order to act they think; objects, because they are among the things that thinking is about. This double-relation to thought raises a question of method for any investigation of agency. If, as Wittgenstein claimed in the Tractatus, “the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts,” then which thoughts is it the primary task of practical philosophy to clarify? The thoughts that agents think, or those that are about them? The thoughts of which they are subjects, or those of which they are objects? Overwhelmingly, analytic philosophers have pursued the latter course. This is what I call the objectification of agency. It has historically taken two main forms, one in action theory, the other in value theory. The first, which I call explanationism, is the practice of accounting for the nature of action in terms of how an action is explained. The second, which I call normativism, is the practice of theorizing agency in terms of how it satisfies, or fails to satisfy, one or another “norm.” (Value theory is standardly divided into moral and aesthetic theory, according to whether the operative norms are moral or aesthetic; in the first domain, normativism takes the specific form of moralism, in the second, that of aestheticism.) Taken together, explanationism and normativism comprise a considerable portion of practical philosophy as it has been practiced in the analytic tradition, and their influence is widely felt even outside boundaries of what is normally considered practical philosophy. My aim is to bring the pattern to light, and thereby to expose it to critical scrutiny. 

    ► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

     

    Anton Ford
    Philosophy
    University of Chicago

     

    12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Tue, Apr 9, 2024

    David Benatar, The Curious Case of Absent Injustice

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    The Curious Case of Absent Injustice

    Last year I presented an Ethics@noonish seminar entitled “A preponderance of injustice”, in which I argued that there is vastly more injustice than justice. In the discussion following that seminar, one interesting objection was that I had failed to account for a vast amount of justice – namely all those cases in which people refrain from doing what they should not do, and in which they do what they should do. In the forthcoming seminar I shall respond methodically to this objection, arguing that it does not upend my earlier conclusion.

    ► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

     

    David Benatar
    Visiting Faculty Fellow                                                    University of Cape Town

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Fri, Apr 19, 2024
    Race, Ethics + Power
    Lucien Ferguson, The Spirit of Caste (REP)

     

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    The Spirit of Caste

    Caste is a concept used to explain persistent forms of social hierarchy and group domination. While it is often associated with India, feudal Europe, and Latin America, scholars in recent years have asked whether it also makes sense to conceptualize the United States as a caste system. This recent discourse overlooks a centuries-long tradition of American civil rights activism—from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois—that understands the United States as a caste system and seeks racial justice through constitutional reform. Returning to this tradition, this talk explores both what the concept of caste misses and what it captures about racial inequality in the United States today.

    ► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

     

    Lucien Ferguson
    Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor
    Boston College Law School

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

Past Events